What is Mobile?

John Battelle has an interesting take on what is mobile in a recent post of his. He says:

Mobile is not a singular use case. Mobile is related to an ecosystem of local (where I am), realtime (what I’m doing right now), and social (who I’m with, who I want to tell about what I’m doing, etc.).

If we take these three points and adapt them to the learning context it seems that mobile flies completely in the face of what traditional education is all about. Where – in a desk, what – listening or reading and social – alone, is how most students would report. But ideally if we want students to engage, even in a school, we could do little things like encouraging group work and sharing of results through mobile devices. I’m sure even those ancient “laptops” could come in handy for this sort of engagement. We can change the locations within a school, or even within a room – think centers/lab stations to allow the student to take some initiative with respect to their own learning. But wait a minute, you say that things like this are already being done? Why do we need to add another gadget into the mix just to say that we can or have?

Why? Because we have to think beyond the walls of the classroom or the bounds of the school. We’ve been talking for years about extending the classroom into the lives of the student to make things that are addressed in the classroom relevant outside the classroom. Mobile devices, with their recording and sharing abilities are great tools to do just that. If we do, the where might become “at the mall, by the water park”, what might then be “watching how larger waves carry people further back” and social might be “with my brother and Jay who both think that it might be interesting to see what would happen if there was a large pillar in the middle of the pool to mess up the wave”. The kicker – kids could hand in this “assignment” right away, eliminating that most dreaded “I forgot my homework” line.